Mirror Man (Captain Beefheart album)
| Mirror Man | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Studio album by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band | ||||
| Released | April 1971 | |||
| Recorded |
TTG Studios, Hollywood, CA October–November 1967 |
|||
| Genre | Blues rock, psychedelic rock | |||
| Length | 52:51 | |||
| Label | Buddah | |||
| Producer | Bob Krasnow | |||
| Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |    |
Mirror Man is the fifth studio album by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. It contains material which was recorded in 1967 for Buddah Records, and which was originally intended for release as part of an abandoned project entitled It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper. Much of the material from this project was subsequently re-recorded and released through a different label as Strictly Personal (1968). The tapes from the original sessions, however, remained under the care of Buddah, who took four of the unissued tunes and released them as Mirror Man in 1971. The record sleeve features an erroneous claim that it had been "recorded one night in Los Angeles in 1965".
The album is dominated by three long, blues-rooted jams featuring uncharacteristically sparse lyrical accompaniment from Beefheart. A fourth tune, the eight-minute "Kandy Korn", is an earlier version of a track that appears on Strictly Personal. In 1999, Buddha Records issued an expanded version of the album entitled The Mirror Man Sessions, which features five additional tracks taken from the abandoned tapes.
When the band went into the studio in late 1967 to record the follow-up to their debut album Safe as Milk, which had been released earlier that year, it was with the intention of producing a double album, provisionally entitled It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper. Three of the tracks they recorded—"Tarotplane", "25th Century Quaker", and "Mirror Man"—were long, psychedelic blues jams performed 'live in the studio' (in one take with no overdubs). These were intended to fill one of the set's two LPs. The band were also working on a number of other tracks, many of which would eventually be included on Strictly Personal (1968). These songs were characterized by their polyrhythmic structures and psychedelic themes, which marked a progression from the band's previous blues-rooted work on Safe as Milk.
The Brown Wrapper concept, however, was at some point abandoned, and many of the tracks from the sessions were left unfinished and without any vocals. The reason for this remains unclear, though Beefheart biographer Mike Barnes suggests it was probably because the band's record label, Buddah, simply lost interest. A number of the abandoned tracks were re-recorded in 1968, and released as Strictly Personal, through producer Bob Krasnow's own record label, Blue Thumb. The original session tapes, however, which included the three long blues jams along with a number of other unreleased songs, remained the property of Buddah, who released Mirror Man in May 1971, compiling the track list from the three 'live' jams and a finished version of "Kandy Korn" (which was one of the tracks re-recorded for Strictly Personal, where it appears in shortened form). The album's original pressing was put together somewhat carelessly, with the cover art featured a shot of the band's 1970 line-up. Later pressings replaced this photo with a more striking image of Van Vliet (Beefheart) wearing a top hat.
...
Wikipedia